


Tangled Soul

by OxfordOctopus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bisexual Ginny Weasley, F/F, Female Harry Potter, Femslash, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kinda, Marriage, Soul Bond, Tom Riddle's Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-11 04:58:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19920733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Short snapshots in the time and life of Aster Lily Potter and Ginevra Molly Weasley, starting from the second year - when they shared a diary of one Tom Marvolo Riddle - and going forward from there.





	Tangled Soul

Face meets shallow water, pushing through as her nose breaks against the stone hidden beneath. There’s a raspy, not-entirely-there laugh that bubbles up from just above, so full of pride and scorn. Everything feels like dead weight, like molten ice water that’s replaced all the blood in her veins, too thick and numbing to let her move and yet excruciatingly hot. Somewhere on her body, somewhere important, _she_ is leaking out, her very sense of self, her mind, her _life_.

Aster resurfaces from the muck, three-quarters blind from the ringing concussion and lack of glasses. Ginny is barely a few feet away from her, eyes vacantly staring at the roof of the chamber, her face pale and sunken. She’s being drained too, Aster knows; she can _feel_ it, feel the knotted tether that anchors them both to the diary, to Tom, to _Voldemort_. A dry sob comes out of her, the first time she’s cried in a long while, as the half-shattered memory of guiding the Basilisk towards Hermione surfaces, the girl’s face briefly swapping to Justin’s and then Penelope’s.

“You’ll both die here, you know,” Tom _croons_ , voice endlessly song-like. Every bit of him is as pretty as his writing, as what she assumed to be his personality. “I’m going to drain you both, leave your corpses for my _heritage_ ”— _the slither of scales, a decadent hiss of enjoyment; the promise of endless pain and yellow eyes_ —”and make sure everyone knows my name, _everyone_.”

Aster chokes back another sob, keeps it in her chest this time. “Why am I awake?” She’s afraid to ask, afraid to _know_.

Tom’s face splits into something that isn’t far from a smile, reflected on the murky water. “Because, I know you’ll never live to speak about it, and I _liked you the most_.”

There’s a tug in her forehead, in her soul, as the world begins to unravel. The end comes, she can feel her breath breaking in the back of her throat, her skin going cold, her scar heating up like molten steel.

Aster screams, blood blooming from some gap in her self and washing over her face with a feeling like acid.

Tom screams, his visage swallowed in the eruption of black that erupts entirely from her forehead.

The blackness screams too, its voice harsh and rattling, as it takes a wraithlike shape, pulling apart as her eyes begin to go dim, as she begins to slip from wakefulness to someplace else, someplace she doesn’t need to be. Ginny, a few paces away, stirs stiffly, eyes regaining focus and giving a few blinks.

Aster can only be happy that one of them might survive this as, with an unpleasant pain in her forehead, consciousness slips free out of her fingers.

■

“—they won't be able to—”

“How could you—”

“Oh, my little—”

“What does this mean? How can—”

“— _together_?—”

“—Dumbledore!”

“—DMLE _must_ be—”

White walls. White ceiling. The smell of potions, a bitter tang that doesn’t at all conform to the thick taste they usually have.

Aster has a brief moment of _there_ , of being awake, of being able to parse language and understand _people_ before it all unfurls like loose thread and she’s gone again.

■

Aster drops her trunk against the far wall, making sure to carefully perch Hedwig’s cage on top of it after. A quick glance around doesn’t hide much about Ginny’s taste in things, from the picture of Gwenog Jones, a plethora of Holyhead Harpies posters, accompanied by the very occasional Weird Sisters poster. The floor is the same polished wood boards as the rest of The Burrow, and the windows in the room all face out towards the orchard, though the room remained somewhat dim due to the fact that it didn’t ever face the sun.

Ginny’s eyes catch her own, the other girl’s expression growing waspish. Aster glances away, towards the bed - now a bunk-bed, which Aster demanded to at least pay for - and towards the cramped space between the top bunk and the ceiling. She was fine with cramped spaces, she’d be fine, this would be fine.

“Hey, can I—”

“Sure.”

Aster forces herself to hide the hurt, to hide the flat dismissal and disinterest. She swallows it down, doesn’t bury herself into her hands like she wants to, doesn’t _cry_ , she represses, she compartmentalizes, she forces her emotions away, to the empty part of her skull, smothers them beneath the pillow and begs God that they might remain dead.

Ginny storms out before she can ask anything else, slamming the door behind her. The room rattles off-center.

The emotions came back. They always do.

■

It’s with little hindsight that a self-aware book isn’t exactly the most trustworthy thing. But then again, Aster had been twelve and afraid and desperately lonely, unable to get along with the other girls in her year largely due to not being what they had _expected_ of her. She wasn’t a pariah necessarily, but once people saw beyond her need to be _someone_ , to be a person instead of a thing locked away in a cupboard, well, they didn’t really find much there. She wasn’t courageous, tending towards paranoid and skittish, and wasn’t one for loud noises. She was shite on a broom, didn’t share any real hobbies or interests with those from the wizarding world or those from the muggle world, and in the end this placed her as ‘person we don’t speak to number two’ in the Gryffindor dorms, Hermione Granger, a well-intentioned but overall socially incapable girl with bushy brown hair, being number one.

Quirrell in the first year hadn’t helped her popularity, any. He’d been obsessed with her, eager to touch and push and _make a scene out of_. It only came out later that this was unusual, that basing Quirrell off of Vernon wasn’t the greatest choice, and that the only reason she’d survived it was because her mother cared a whole lot when she had been violently murdered. People avoided her after that, after they found out she burned a professor to death when his actions became decidedly unfriendly and more ill-intentioned, and her coming back from the summer all the more thin and bruised probably hadn’t endeared her to any of the first years.

Ginny had, she was pretty sure, only stuck around originally because she was Aster Lily Potter, ‘The-Girl-Who-Lived’. She’d taken what she could get, and Ginny had taken her, at least at the start, on a rapidfire exploration of wizarding culture, sports, interests and hobbies. Aster had become rather adept at gobstones by the end of the first month, if she’d say so herself, and while Ron still came around to sneer at the two of them and demand she ‘stay away from his sister’, Aster was pretty sure the only person who disliked Ron more than her - and maybe Hermione - was his own sister.

Then Ginny had introduced her to Tom, wanted to _share_ this new and amazing thing, and everything had tipped over and turned rotten.

In one capacity or another, they’d both enabled ten people being petrified and had both nearly died when Tom had come out of the book with their souls in his hands like rope, intent on tying their respective nooses. Dumbledore, in the aftermath, had told her that because of the ‘left over darkness’ in her scar, Tom had, in a manner of speaking, exploded when trying to absorb it. The scar itself was gone, too, only a patch of silver skin a bit larger but considerably less obvious covered the area it used to be in. Tom’s rather abrupt and unexpected death had also complicated things, left Ginny and her own soul combined in some capacity. Not fully, no, they were still separate entities, but because they were both being swallowed up by Tom, they both had a link to one-another, an area where their souls overlapped and blended.

It means that, in rough terms, if either of them left an area about the size of Hogwarts away from one-another, their soul would stop functioning until such a time when they went back into range with one-another, something that would need to be done _manually_ because both of them would end up acting like Dementor victims until such a time when they were reconnected. The link also tended to blur things together, Aster getting Ginny’s memories and feelings and some personality traits as well as vice-versa. It well and truly blended them together, left them incapable of being independent, bound them like a chain and expected for them to cope.

It took the entire summer for Ginny to speak to her again.

— _“I – I didn’t,” Ginny’s wail was raspy, throaty and broken and painful. Aster stares blearily at her bunkmate, the one who now clung to her like the limpet she’d been during her first year, far separated from the cold, sharp thing she’d been all summer. Ginny tries to speak again, tries to do something, but all that comes out is a babble of sobs and half-desperate wails_ —

As it would turn out, Ginny had immediately started getting her memories - and therefore nightmares - from the Dursleys’, a place she would now, _blessedly_ , never have to return to. This had put her on edge, obviously, and had made speaking about it, approaching what she now knew, _rather difficult_.

(For what it was worth, Aster only saw Ginny’s early memories of George and Fred and now knew, somehow, to instinctively know who was who even if they were for all intents and purposes identical.)

■

It’s the small things you learn to cherish when being hunted by an insane madman who worked for the person that killed your parents in cold blood. It’s the fact that Ginny is a Parselmouth, that they use it to speak _openly_ and flagrantly between them, to show that the ability to speak with overconfident, pompous, and decidedly _stupid_ reptiles does not a Dark Lady make. It’s the fact that Aster can share a sleeping space with Ginny, to share the comfort that both of them need to heal, that she might not get with Lavender’s reignited interest in everything Aster. She'd be at Hogwarts for an extra year, was _considered_ a second year instead of a third year, went to second year classes and so forth, but it was worth it, all things considered.

It’s the fact that Ron’s godawful creepy rat, the one who used to stare unblinkingly at her when she tried to change at the Burrow - and do the same to Ginny - to the point where she started ensuring the damn thing was out of the room and then escalated to blocking off the bottom of the bedroom door, died squealing in the mouth of Crookshanks. Oh, of course, she could’ve stopped it, seeing as Crookshanks loved her just as much if not more than Hermione, but she didn’t.

■

Turns out Scabbers wasn’t a rat.

■

Summer came back with a bright, bristling vengeance. Let nobody say that Scotland is a miserable shitheap all of the time, since it’s clearly only a wet and depressing rocky hill when it needs to spite people.

Fourth (third now, technically?) year had been surprisingly quiet, all things considered. Oh, sure, the Malfoys were making attempts to cut off Arthur’s access to funding and deny Muggleborns their access to schooling in general - not everyone went to Hogwarts, after all - but aside from the worsening political landscape there hadn’t been a _single_ attempt on her life. Even in the third year she’d had those, what with the Dementors, but this year? No sir. She didn’t have _one_ especially violent or bad thing happen, not even something like a good thing - a tournament, maybe a circus? - actually turning out to be an evil or bad thing.

Aster stretches, feels the way her muscles unclench and loosen out like taffy. All around her the garden was repotted and replanted, filled with plants she’d found particularly interesting or ones that Neville - and to a lesser extent, Hermione - recommended. None of them were particularly _nasty_ , admittedly, Aster sure as shit wouldn’t trust the twins around volatile produce, what with how dangerous they can be around inert substances.

Arms slither into place around her waist, a nose buries itself into the crown of her head and Gin’s scent - oiled oak, grass, parchment paper - soaks in as she’s the victim of a drowsy, clingy bunkmate.

“H’w d’ya wake up early,” is her morning mumble.

Aster reached up - Gin was frankly a _tower_ \- and patted her on the cheek, offering a loose smile. “I just do.”

The blending of souls gave them a bunch of things, some of which were helpful. Aside from sharing nightmares, dreams, sometimes personality traits, and strong emotions, it also demanded that physical contact be sought after and made tracking the other down pretty easy. It wasn’t _perfect_ , necessarily, but it gave a general idea, a ‘in this direction’ sort of sense towards where the other was.

Research on the topic was, frankly, not coming along well. While at first the Unspeakable they were grouped with had been rather upbeat about the concept, seeing as Wizards also have a long history of fictional stories around ‘soul bonds’, a concept that _kinda_ works the same, years of study and looking for their root sources hadn’t gotten anyone anything. The original goal had been to separate them, to let them live independent, but whether it was the blending itself or just, well, _Ginny_ , Aster was coming to find she was more or less okay with the circumstances. All things considered, it could be measurably worse.

■

Umbridge is a black mark on the record, but Gin’s presence cautions patience. Neville got himself into running a Defense club somewhere, and had offered to invite them both, but seeing as Aster wasn’t really considered a public hero anymore - the thing about the chamber mixed with her very public, stuck-to-the-hip relationship with Gin put that to rest - and Gin had a more vested interest in Runes nowadays, neither could bring themselves to make time for it.

Of course, not everything is peachy or ignorable. Umbridge is recalcitrant, taking out her anger not just on Aster for being a half-blood - something Hermione pointed out in a lengthy rant that she was _too_ \- but also because of her relationship with Gin. Relationship is a strong word for something that had been a few kisses over the last summer and a lot more time spent together, but Aster did understand that she was targeting that _anyway_.

■

Lucius made a bid for Minister after very obviously ousting Fudge.

Two days later, his character is assassinated after a series of incredibly crude letters sent to Andromeda Tonks (née Black) and more than a few pictures of him with his pants down in bed with Bellatrix Lestrange found their way onto the front page of the Daily Prophet.

Gin, always elegant, made Neville look at the pictures only to be shocked when the boy fell over into hysterical laughter. Umbridge completely loses it, though her time remaining at Hogwarts was limited, and tells Neville to write lines with that godawful quill _in public_. To his credit, Neville never stops smiling throughout the entire incident.

Three days later, Umbridge is publicly ousted by McGonagall and Dumbledore.

Gin kisses her full on the mouth when Umbridge’s escort passes where they sit. Umbridge's face goes about as green and open-mouthed as the toad she so looks like.

Nobody is surprised by the development in their relationship, apparently.

■

Aster has her tongue in Gin’s mouth and her hands in Gin’s shirt when Ron slams the door open, screams that they’re ‘both gross, oh my god’, and chucks a rolled up newspaper at the both of them.

Gin has to be restrained from attacking him, and only stops when she notices the paper. Aster does too.

Voldemort’s fully dead, says the Ministry. He did something to keep himself alive but - and oh god, here it goes again - because of research that Aster had taken part in, they could identify what he was doing to keep himself from the veil and then make something to track all the pieces.

They never do get back to the snog after that. Shame.

■

“I can’t believe you’re marrying my sister.” Ron, ever the charmer, is complaining at the table. Neville, to his right, and Hermione, to Neville's right, are holding hands and looking like they’re just about to plan their own wedding, all things considered.

It’s been two years since they both graduated Hogwarts, one year since they had a discussion about what their lives in the future were going to be like - see: not Quidditch, unfortunately - and settling into a home that was, decidedly, not the burrow. While the stereotype of lesbians moving in together is somewhat valid - though Gin’s bisexual, and Aster’s more into Gin than boys or girls, to be truthful - she’s pretty sure she has the right to marry Gin after being with her since her fourth academic and fifth total year at Hogwarts

“Go dunk your head, Ronnie,” Gin jams her - heeled - foot into Ron’s exposed back - the fancy chairs don’t offer defensive measures, fortunately - and sends the ginger to the ground. There’s some laughing, even from Ron, but eventually everyone slinks back to their old groups to continue on with the after party.

“You know,” Gin mumbled conspiratorially, her tone something Aster both loves and thoroughly _hates_ to hear, what with the mischief it often preludes. “We could ditch the party, now that we’ve at least showed up?”

Aster squints, glancing at her wife-to-be. That’s an incredibly non-explosive plan for that tone of voice.

Gin just smiles back, the quirk of her lips inspiring images of foxes and coyotes and nothing particularly good. Aster, knowing better than to tempt fate, takes Gin’s hand and lets her be dragged away, wondering if, like before, she might have to block the Floo to avoid Molly’s wrath after whatever is about to happen takes place.


End file.
